


the monster at the end of this book

by freudiancascade



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: And He Knows It, Gen, also i have feelings about family units forming out of shared trauma, and i think that's beautiful., in alien we don't say 'finale', jacobi is the stray cat that wanders into their lives every now and then, major spoilers for Brave New World, tagged for 'major character death' but i'm just working with what's already in canon, we say 'everything hurts and i'm dying' instead, who knew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 19:36:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13197114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freudiancascade/pseuds/freudiancascade
Summary: Six months later, Jacobi is still trying to figure out how the story’s supposed to end.(Post Brave New World, full of spoilers.)





	the monster at the end of this book

"Here's how it goes: soon as I hit soil, I go back to Goddard."

"What!?"

"Oh, stop looking at me like that. You all know what I am, and it's gonna take a lot more than a little bit of trauma to change it. Listen, here's the plan: I keep that nifty little SI-5 security clearance. I get Hera parked in a nice backyard somewhere. I find -- what was it he said? -- oh, right, _your boy Dougie Fresh_ over there a scientist mad enough to take cash bribes and quietly make sure that virus in his bloodstream isn't going to end the entire freaking world. I do terrible things to terrible people in the service of even more terrible people, and on my weekends off from being a monster, Isabel, you and I take that security clearance they so nicely provided me and we find some really expensive assets to burn to the ground. Sound good?"

"As good as we're going to get, I guess."

"Yeah. That's what I thought, too."

* * *

**Six Months In**

* * *

Jacobi had healed up badly, and he knew it. One eyelid drooped from ridges of scar tissue stretching his cheek, he hadn’t gotten his teeth fixed yet, the bridge of his nose had stayed jagged from being broken at least four times in quick succession, and he was pretty sure there was going to be ramifications eventually to ignoring that much blunt force trauma to his chest. Missing half an eyebrow, too, and he’d grown his hair out just enough to cover a bald patch the size of a dollar coin on the side of his head. The medbay of the Urania had been equipped enough to fix a lot of the damage, but he'd refused to patch up anything that wasn’t urgent. Between the gunshot wounds and psywave-induced internal haemorrhaging and broken bones and "whatever Major Tom’s brain deal is now," it wasn't worth taking up the system resources to repair. A drop of a problem, in a vast ocean of them.

And then they’d hit Earth and he’d disembarked that ship, felt his body threaten to cave in from the gravity and kept walking anyways. And kept walking. And kept walking. Gave himself a couple nifty stress fractures on top of everything else. Whatever, it worked itself out eventually.

Even if he had taken better care of his injuries, it was impossible to look in a mirror and feel okay with knowing that the person blinking at you through the glass hadn't changed, anyways. Maybe keeping the scars was helping him, in some small way, keep a distance up between who he was now and who he used to be. 

He was on his own, anyways, which suited him. Minkowski and Hera and Lovelace and Eiffel all lived together now, which struck him as something of a waking nightmare. Within weeks of their return they’d all flocked to each other like a group of birds caught in perpetual migration, and now they’d made something of a home. Visiting it was uncomfortable, he was tempted to throw the duffel bag through the living room window and bolt, but Renée had been working in the yard and invited him in with an equal mix of welcome and caution. She’d been growing summer squash, the tendrils taking root in the soil.

It was strange, to see her hands covered in earth.

Doug was in the living room, watching television, and he budged amicably up to make room on the couch for Jacobi to sit. And he wouldn’t have been surprised if Isabel was lurking somewhere, pointing a rifle at his head just in case he'd brought the rest of Goddard Futuristics knocking down their door. Couldn’t have too warm a welcome, now. As he talked, he watched Renée's hands absently prodding the spot on her abdomen where the bullet had come out. It was an unconscious gesture, like she needed to know it was real. It happened, and she was still here, alive on the other side of it.

Or maybe he was overthinking it, and all their scars were just that. Scars. He wasn't even sure why he kept helping them, not after everything, but figured it was close enough to self-interest to count. He didn’t want a wide-scale Decima outbreak any more than the rest of the crew, after all. Had to make sure Doug had ready access to labs and doctors who could give a long-term prognosis and prevent that kind of thing, because he'd suggested painlessly nipping that problem in the bud before it got back to Earth at all _one freaking time_ , and been met with glares that still haunted him.

At least he had plenty of reason to need to see Goddard Futuristics turned to ash, too. Setting Isabel Lovelace on them like a targeted missile had a nice symmetry to it, sure, sign him up for her vendetta.

He didn’t even have to shake Goddard's operation down too hard to discover that Douglas Eiffel wasn't the only human that Pryce and Cutter had turned inside out. Not even the only one to be left with a brain full of soup in the wake of it. On the opposite side of Renée and Doug's coffee table, Jacobi dumped out a duffel full of tapes and transcripts of interviews, discs and hard drives. All the evidence he could dig up from hundreds of secret archives and disgruntled ex-employees (admittedly, not many of those were still alive) and buried black boxes. Proof of people quietly left strewn like roadkill in those monsters' wake. 

He pulled one out of the pile at random, and Hera played it on the television. In the interview, a woman rambled distantly about making friends with the rocks that lined the river that ran through the town where she lived, because she didn’t remember how to talk to people. They’d taken that from her. Her face was pointed and thin; her eyes vacant in an awful and familiar way. She said it was hard to want to relearn anything, when living was so lonely. 

Doug’s face grew pinched at that, his hands squeezing a pillow tight to his stomach.

In another set of files, an entire small town had been made to vanish overnight. It read like something out of a bad video game, an early Decima strain contained with bullets and blood and Class D amnesiacs. Jacobi wondered if the man he’d known as Alexander Hilbert — the man known in some of those files as Dmitri Volodin, Elias Selberg, and probably by several other names Jacobi hadn’t been clever enough to unmask yet — had been involved. Hilbert had most definitely known about it, at least. Had he known about everything Cutter was planning? About using his life’s work as a double-edged sword, to carve a better future with blood-slicked hands on the knife?

Had Kepler known that all along? Was that why he’d hated the ship’s doctor so much, right from the very first day of the mission?

Suddenly Jacobi wanted to run. Not to get away, but to hit pavement until he couldn't feel his feet, until the aching in his chest was from the burning in his lungs instead of the twisting in his heart. 

* * *

_Once upon a time there was a little boy called Daniel, and he was never going to fly. There was a lot of being angry and there was a lot of being exceptional without it being noticed by anybody, and a lot of taking that frustration out on any inanimate object unlucky enough to be both flammable and in-range._

_And then there was a boy called Warren, who gave him a universe to explode into confetti. Who gave him fireworks to light just for the fun of seeing them burn against the dark. Who didn’t want him to ever be anything other than the best of what he was._

_And then there was a girl named Alana, who was so much smarter than him. Who made such clever miracles of wire and code, entire new universes. Who made him laugh until his stomach hurt._

_And then they were all exceptional together, and it was something like a family. Alana created and Daniel destroyed and Warren kept them safe, and they did bad things but they were very good for each other._

_Even if nobody wanted to admit it, that was the story, and it was the best life that Daniel had ever known._

* * *

Renée pushed herself up to her feet and rubbed at her forehead as she crossed the room, as though she could reach through to the headache pounding beneath her skin. “I need a coffee. Do you want coffee too, Jacobi? Eiffel?"

Eiffel waved a hand in response. “No, and wow, you just Eiffel’ed me for literally no reason that time."

Renée winced in the doorway, pausing just a moment to call back, “Oh, damn. Sorry, Doug. Old habit."

“No, I don’t mind it,” the former communications officer said immediately, relaxing his grip on the pillow and looking anywhere but at the black duffel bag on the floor. One of his wrists was a little bit crooked, another badly-healed bone jutting up in an awkward rise beneath his skin, and it made his hand shake. 

_Please don’t try to strike up conversation_ , Jacobi thought intently in the other man’s direction, as though alien telepathy was the kind of thing that could rub off by proxy.

“I really don’t mind when she does that,” Eiffel said, oblivious.  _Damn._ “She gets flustered, but it’s fine by me. The bossy military stuff kinda reminds me that she’s the sort of person who would make up a story about harpooning a literal plant monster, and then convince everybody else to play along with it. Like I’m not gonna eventually see _Little Shop of Horrors_ and read _Moby Dick_  and put two and two together to figure out that there’s no way —“

“Wait,” Jacobi blurted. “You read?”

Doug ducked his head in affirmation, a sheepish grin stuck to his face. “You’re, like, the fourth person to have asked me that. Out of the four people I’ve met so far who’d know me enough to tell. So, not a great ratio. But yeah, I’m trying to rebuild a history of, like, everything? And since I’m not really going to be allowed out of quarantine for another couple weeks, until we’re totally sure this last round of treatment took and I’m not going to accidentally start a world-ending plague, I’ve got time. So yes, I read.”  

Jacobi studied him, unsure how to feel.

Doug laughed, a full and effortless kind of sound. “Don’t look so worried, I promise Hera helps me look up the big words. Sometimes she’ll even read to me, if I say please and let her pick the book.”

“Ah. That’s….nice of her." He could only imagine what kind of books Hera would choose, left to her own devices. The AI steadfastly avoided talking to him -- now that her command protocols were all garbled outside of military structure she didn't have to even acknowledge his presence, and he wasn't about to press the issue.

Doug cocked his gaze askance, as though trying to see through a mote of dust in a sunbeam. “...We were never actually friends, were we? You and I, I mean.”

Jacobi was fiercely and keenly jealous of Doug Eiffel, just for a moment, and then it passed. “No, we weren’t.” 

Of course Doug hadn’t chosen to stop being a member of the world’s worst club, or if he had chosen it, he couldn’t exactly be held responsible for the consequences now. “Maybe that can change?”

“Nah, I don’t think it will.” Jacobi worked the edge of his thumbnail along the inside of his index finger to avoid clenching a fist.

“Oh.”

Jacobi sighed. “Listen, it’s nothing personal. I just don’t think we’d get along, really. Plus, left to my own devices, I’d totally have left you to die on least five different occasions up there.”

"So, you’re saying it’d just be awkward?”

“Yeah. Sure. Something like that."

* * *

_Once upon a time there was a girl named Alana, and she planned to live forever through the magnificent creations she built out of electricity-strung words. She met a boy named Daniel and a boy named Warren and they had many adventures, saw many amazing things and met many incredible people._

_They saw a village in a rainforest, and a city built from sand; a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, and a city of skyscrapers that made Alana dizzy with possibilities. Beaches made of green sand, and expanses of snow that stretched far enough into the distance to render the grey sky meaningless. Queens and princes, beggars and scientists, businessmen and preachers, artificial intelligences of every kind. Bomb shelters and underground laboratories. Everything, everyone, and everywhere._

_Alana was very smart and Daniel was very sly and Warren was both those things, and they were exceptional together.  They trusted each other with their lives, and so Alana knew they had plenty of time to figure out how to never die._

_To keep running together, forever._

* * *

Something unsettled still churned around in Jacobi's gut as Renée returned to the room, clutching a tray of coffee. It smelled like cinnamon, even from this distance, and Jacobi felt strange to realize she was the kind of person who, left to her own devices, put cinnamon in her coffee. His hand closed around the closest cup as Renée sat down across from him. 

He stayed seated, instead of heading for the door.

"Do you regret it?" Jacobi asked, and he knew his eyes were burning with intensity, knew he couldn't hide it, but also knew (or at least, believed in that moment) that maybe Renée was the one person he could talk to. And maybe that was the reason he’d tracked them down after all, and everything else on the table between them was just noise.

"Regret what?” She was cautious (fair) and guarded (fairer, which just made him feel his pulse beating on his open sleeve). He knew his professionalism was failing him, his compartmentalization was caving in and sending long-buried earthquakes out through his bones, but he blurted anyways,

'Regret that you couldn't watch that station burn with your own two eyes.”

She tilted her head at him in a way that he felt right beneath his sternum. Took a sip of her coffee, released a breath long and slow. "Sometimes. It's hard to put ghosts to rest, when you never saw the body."

And damn it all to hell, the way she looked at him with faint pity and bottomless empathy, Jacobi was certain she did know what he was actually asking, after all, and so he dragged his next words out from between his teeth.

“Six months, and I still don’t know if there’s any family that should be told Kepler’s dead,” he admitted, setting the coffee on the table and folding his arms over his chest. “Everything we went through, and he never told me that, and none of the records say shit about it.  And even if I found them, it's not like I ever saw a body. Maybe if she were here, Alana could have found something, but guess what? She’s gone, too! I'm the only one left, and I'm supposed to figure out what to do when I don't even know how -- damn it all to hell, he betrayed me and I don't even how he died!"

“I’m so sorry, Daniel.” And of course she didn't have answers for him, because there weren't any answers to be had. Not here, not this time. Not ever, really.

“Jacobi,” he corrected automatically, and felt his stomach twist. “This shouldn’t be my problem, right? He made his choices, I don’tget to spend the rest of my life cleaning up after them, _that’s not how it works_."

“If it helps,” she said, breathing in the steam from her cup, “I don’t think there’s really a way this is _supposed_ to work. None of this is ever _supposed_ to happen to people.”

"Ha! No. I'm SI-5. Dealing with the things that aren’t supposed to happen to people is _supposed_ to be the one thing I’m good at!"

Minkowski lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, yes, of course. I forgot Goddard had that top-secret facility to train you people how to handle aliens, world-ending plagues, and getting betrayed by literally everybody you were supposed to trust.”

“That’s not too far off what they’ve actually got.” He nudged the duffel with a toe, exhaling. His chest still felt tight, but his heart no longer seemed to be trying to fly out of it. So, progress. “Wild reading, in there. ...Maybe you should hand it off to Eiffel.”

* * *

_Once upon a time there was a boy named Warren, and it doesn’t matter where he came from because that isn’t part of this story. What matters is this: There are stories that we tell, and stories that we do not. There are stories that the people who love us get to know, and stories that we keep from them because that’s the only way to love them in return._

_There are stories that we have to live with, and stories that we have to die with, and all stories eventually become one of those two things. It doesn’t matter how smart and sly and exceptional you are — that’s just how stories work, and the boy named Warren knew that with all his heart._

_But to tell people that would have taken the magic away, and so he didn’t. Much better to keep his secret, and look clever. To captivate the world with a grin and a tall tale, served up on the rocks._

_(And then he died, and all of his stories became the second kind anyways.)_

* * *

As the sun stretched long across the lawn, Jacobi left the small bungalow and the makeshift family with his bag lighter and his mind swirling.

“Go through those things and call me when you decide which of Goddard’s stuff you want to blow up next. Tacoma sucked, couldn't send too much biomedical debris into the stratosphere, but I’ll make sure you get a real big boom out of the next one,” he’d said before he left, affecting just enough of a dumb American accent to make Lovelace almost smile as she shouldered her rifle and promised that she would.

He wasn't part of their group, not really. He got on board too late for that, and team "good guys" was never going to sit right on his shoulders. But he could work with them -- he wasn't entirely alone, not yet, and perhaps that was worth something.

* * *

_Once upon a time there was a boy who gave another boy fireworks to light off against the night sky, and they were good together. Once upon a time there was a brilliant girl who loved them both, and she was also good. They did bad things in amazing ways, and they knew their family was the best thing each other had ever had._

_Once upon a time, there was a distant star that changed colours and acted as a doorway to the rest of the galaxy. One family survived a journey to that star, found each other in the universe, and found their way home again._

_But for the other, exceptional family, a journey to that distant star ended their story together, and their secrets died with them._

_And the boy named Daniel lit fireworks in a field alone, watched them bloom against the night like ashes spreading in the wind. And he drank some single malt, neck craned to the sky until the sparks of color faded from his sight. Closed his eyes to savour the little pinpricks of light against the inside of his eyelids, and breathed in the taste of smoke._

_He was alone, and he was still exceptional, and he would never have the answers. Still, he could search for new things to light on fire._

_And maybe, someday, that would become good enough._


End file.
